So last night my firewall decided to say F you Reann and stopped working for no apparent reason. I called my ISP to see if it was anything on their end but it was a big nope. It was rather late at night and I do not have computers with monitors at my place so I thought I was SOL. I was frustrated that I could not do anything because I had the bright idea of deleting one of my two static IPs out of the router and than reboot it. I thought to calm my frustrations I would play some games on my ipad, and holly poop am I ever not used to all the ads in mobile games. Luckily my youtube ad blocking does not require anything else on my LAN so I put on some videos and went to bed. In the morning I remembered I had a ethernet to USB adapter and a USB A to c adapter so I would be able to fix it that way. Don’t know how many times I needed to fix the firewall because I broke the internet trying to fix my boo boos and a few times the firewall just said F you Reann I am not putting out. But it is now fixed and I can enjoy my moble games and web browsing mostly ad free!
So I had no pihole action on my LAN.
Like seriously how do people hand how many ads are shoved at you when you are using your devices?
I was on DuckDuckGo this morning trying to fix things and wow the ads, really made me miss searXNG.
Luckily I do not get spam, I spin up a new address for everything so I did not get those ads at least.
What are these ads you speak of? 😎
Kidding aside…ya’ll go crazy with your piHoles and such and I’m over here using software that just…doesn’t serve ads. I think the most I’ve had to do is install Karma Firewall on the kids tablets and maybe change the front end on the TVs (which doesn’t connect to the net, though media stick does).
That and uBlock on browser seems to give me 90% of the results of using pihole, pfsense etc. So, I just…stopped using them.
Now, when I visit my folks…yeah…holy shit…but I wonder sometimes if some of this adblocking stuff doesn’t go overboard.
It’s a little bit like the four rules for winning a street fight.
- Avoid stupid people.
- Avoid people doing stupid things.
- Avoid stupid places.
- Avoid stupid times.
but I wonder sometimes if some of this adblocking stuff doesn’t go overboard.
How so? I haven’t seen ads on any of my devices in decades. In fact, if I can’t bend a site to my will, with my parameters, I’ll go elsewhere. 90% of the time, that info is duplicate a hundredfold across the internet.
I spin up a new address for everything so I did not get those ads at least.
This is the way. Silo all accounts. I use Firefox relay, and another service called BurnerMail. I can literally spin up unlimited email aliases. In fact, BurnerMail will allow you to specifically name the alias for the specific account. So, you could have reddit.5742@mailbeaver.net. Which is handy for filtering and directing emails to specific folders, including the trash can in your email client.
You ask how people handle how many adds are shoved when using their devices. I think it’s due to the slow immersion into them over the years. Early web was mostly banner ads which became flashy and distracting. It started around that time and people being people, most just never really thought different as that’s the way the WWW is.
For those of us who run adblockers or use an ad-blocking DNS, and have done so for many years, it is quite jarring to see the unfiltered ad-infested scape of the web. (Most commonly when installing an new OS and not yet setting up the DNS) Some people are happy with them as every search engine ad link they click works and they go about their merry way.
it is quite jarring to see the unfiltered ad-infested scape of the web.
It’s more than jarring. It makes me want to rage quit when I’m over at a friend’s house trying to help them work through an issue. Especially now that most people have migrated to Windows 11. So, now you have webpages of ads and popups, and the OS itself is inundating you with popups and ads. And it’s not like I haven’t spent hours with my friends trying to get them to cut that shit out.
I still run an instance of Windows 10 on a local account, but it has been severely detached from the mother ship and de-bloated. Telemetry, communications with Microsoft, etc, are handled by a very long host file. Services are to a bare minimum. Pfsense filters Microsoft crap as well. Now since updates are no longer being offered, that door has been shut too. So now, it’s just an OS without the umbilical cord to the mother ship.
Rawdogging the internet is a great way to catch a disease.
Yeah I know it was a very iffy time luckily it was only one night and morning. I broke the protection many times today but I am all wrapped up now.
Good to hear brother, stay safe.
I run two synchonised Adguard instances on two different devices as DNS servers for the house (and for my work PC via vpn). on top of that I run local ad blockers on top of that. I dont care that my DNS ping times are a few ms longer. I dont want to be pestered, tracked, solicited or interrupted.
I cant stand the barrage of ads, especially on mobile websites, like its at the point where you want to read an article and you get two lines of text and the entire rest of the screen is ads you have to navigate.
Those few MS of latency are worth the recursive DNS and lack of ads for me too.
It’s been the best thing in my stack for a long time now.
I have 2 instances of pihole running in my LAN, I have wireguard on my firewall to get to those two ad blockers when I am away from home. I am so glad I was able to figure out how to get it back up and running without needing to redo all the work.
I have pihole do a lot more than just block ads; they also block a few different tlds (like .zip), they have different lists for different vLANs, and there are several different regex things I have in it.
They are not on the same pi, sure they are both docker images but they are on different pi’s
I can’t recall the last time I saw ads. Years probably. Between using uBlock, more secure browsers, invidious or clients that use invidious for YT, as much open-source stuff as possible, self-hosting through Tailscale and vpn including SearXNG, etc. I want to setup a pihole but haven’t had the need to yet as my setups have served me well.
Your mom always gives up the pihole.
